Silver Linings
Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket;
they are regarded as dust on the scales;
he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.
~ The Prophet Isaiah speaking about God
My burden is light. Come to me.
~ Jesus
Eight years ago, I stood in an unexpected place. Conveyor belts and cardboard boxes (and more and more boxes). And, we’ll say, a dialect of conversation I had not been around in a while.
Hello, UPS.
The tale of those days belong to another time, but a memory came flooding back this week. My job was to take boxes from a conveyor belt and put them in brown trucks. Urgency and boxes and supervisors and unions and boxes and machine noise and never-ending-boxes.
Back-to-back boxes one early morning taught me a lesson.
The first smaller than a shoebox. Full of huge bolts. I almost threw my back out as I grabbed hold of what seemed like a small thing that weighed much more than it looked.
The second larger than a dishwasher. Full of … air? Sizeable but inconsequential in any meaningful way. Do people ship empty boxes around the country? Sure, it took up some space, but it weighed nothing to me.
The truth: Far too often, the appearance of a thing can have no bearing on its weightiness.
Last Tuesday Amy and I found a big box. As we, with my doctor, looked at my chart over the past few years, there was no wiggle room - we are back in cancer territory. The past three months have seen a spike in my levels that is undeniable. We’ve been waiting for this moment, but has absolutely hoped it would be a few years further out.
Even so, there is some incredibly heartening news. We had thought this would mean heading into some ‘big’ treatment. That path would be 10-ish days in hospital and 30-45 days of recovery at home.
By God’s grace that is not happening.
Rather the next step is to add a new drug to my pharmaceutical cocktail (a low-toxicity drug, thankfully) that should push that ‘big’ treatment down the road, we hope for years.
In the meantime, that ‘big’ treatment is launching a 2.0 version that is much less toxic than the current version. It should hit the market in the next 18 months or so and be waiting for me when this cancer tries making another comeback.
In all this, we have experienced a great mystery at work. It is not the strength of the human spirit or the resiliency of our family. It is God coming into these circumstances and changing the weight of this big box. We have our moments, but the weight of this box is disproportionately light.
How do the big things become so light in the hands of Jesus? How the grace of God bears us up in ways that cannot be explained. Our Father doesn’t just measure the nations in his hands, he measures our daily burdens, and they are dust on the scales. how easily and willingly he bears them up. We are thankful that the grace of Go has come down in this. May it ever be that this burden is carried by larger hands than we have.